Article

Surveillance and violence from

afar: The politics of drones and
liminal security-scapes

Theoretical Criminology
15(3) 239254
The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1362480610396650
tcr.sagepub.com

Tyler Wall

Eastern Kentucky University, USA

Torin Monahan

Vanderbilt University, USA

Abstract
As surveillance and military devices, dronesor unmanned aerial vehiclesoffer a
prism for theorizing the technological politics of warfare and governance. This prism
reveals some violent articulations of US imperialism and nationalism, the dehumanizing
translation of bodies into targets for remote monitoring and destruction, and the
insidious application of militarized systems and rationalities to domestic territories and
populations. In this article, we analyze the deployment of drones within warzones in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and borderzones and urban areas in the USA. What
we call the drone stare is a type of surveillance that abstracts people from contexts,
thereby reducing variation, difference, and noise that may impede action or introduce
moral ambiguity. Through these processes, drones further normalize the ongoing
subjugation of those marked as Other.
Keywords
drones, militarization, risk management, surveillance, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
The corporeal politics of space, place, and identity are powerfully inflected by technological systems of remote surveillance and violence. This is especially evident with
drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which the US and other governments have
been deploying with greater frequency across a diverse range of territories (CNN, 2010;
Lewis, 2010). Drones have garnered recent media attention as remote-controlled, kill-ata-distance technologies, which allow soldier pilots stationed potentially thousands of
miles away to collect military intelligence, identify targets, and fire missiles at suspected
Corresponding author:
Tyler Wall, Department of Criminal Justice, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY 40475, USA
Email: tyler.wall@eku.edu

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enemies. In addition to being used in warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and northern

Pakistan, UAV systems are being used for managing emergencies caused by natural
disasters (Dean, 2007), spying on foreign drug cartels (Padgett, 2009), finding criminal
activity in urban and rural areas (Lewis, 2010; Public Intelligence, 2010), and conducting
border control operations (Walters and Weber, 2010).
While drones appear to affirm the primacy of visual modalities of surveillance, their
underlying rationalities are more nuanced and problematic. As complex technological
systems, drones are both predicated upon and productive of an actuarial form of surveillance. They are employed to amass data about risk probabilities and then manage populations or eliminate network nodes considered to exceed acceptable risk thresholds. In part,
drones are forms of surveillance in keeping with the precepts of categorical suspicion
and social sorting that define other contemporary surveillance systems (Gandy, 1993;
Murakami Wood et al., 2006; Lyon, 2007; Monahan, 2010). Drones may perform predominately in the discursive register of automated precision and positive identification
of known threats, but in practice, these surveillance systems and their agents actively
interpret ambiguous information that continuously defies exact matches or clear
responses. In the process, UAV systems may force homogenization upon difference,
thereby reducing variation to functional categories that correspond to the needs and
biases of the operators, not the targets, of surveillance. All surveillance and dataveillance
systems are prone to errors that have harsh ramifications for the subjects whose flawed
data doubles haunt them (Haggerty and Ericson, 2006). Drone-based surveillance systems are no exception, as witnessed by verified cases of collateral damage caused by
drone strikes (Bergen and Tiedemann, 2010).
Drones also illustrate some key dynamics in the relationship between surveillance and
militarization. These devices are woven up in myths of technological superiority, objectivity, and control that help support their adoption. By means of their supposed accuracy
and precision, drone systems may encourage the hostile targeting of threats in military
settings while further inuring people to invisible monitoring in domestic spheres.
However, drones reveal important dissonances in militarization processes. The narrative
of rationalization is interrupted in telling waysby technological and human errors that
kill innocent people, by emotional affect experienced by drone operators who may feel
closer to their targets than they would like, by innovative uses of camouflage and monitoring of drone feeds by so-called enemies, and by media broadcasts of these and other
instabilities in drone systems. Thus, although general trends can be discerned in the
application of drones across territories, UAVslike all systems of surveillance and
violenceare neither monolithic nor static; they are always multiple, contingent, and
negotiated. As such, analysis of drone systems requires us to acknowledge the violent or
dehumanizing potentials of such technologies, and be sensitive to the active mediation of
such logics by people and organizations in local contexts.
To that end, in this article we discuss UAVs as they circulate in combat zones in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and in territorial borderzones and urban areas in the
USA. These different geographies can be understood as liminal security-scapes
(Gusterson, 2004), where the practices of everyday life are unstable and insecure and
where bodies are subjected to routine surveillance and violence. By focusing on these
different sites, we begin to deconstruct the politics of drones and to theorize actuarial
forms of surveillance and social control taken to the extreme.

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Technological politics and cosmic control

In the contested arenas of organized warfare and international immigration, drones
extend the control logics that have long characterized modern warfare (Haggerty, 2006).
Paul Virilio (1986, 1997) argues that western society is defined by its quest for faster and
more mobile technologiesfrom transportation vehicles such as the car and airplane to
information technologies such as the television and computer. For Virilio (1986, 1997),
the western obsession with technological development is first and foremost linked to
warfare and militaries, and secondarily to the political desire to control people and their
movements. By identifying those who control the various technologies of speed in a
given society we can also identify the victors. Unequal mobility and speed corresponds
with what Eyal Weizman (2007) has called the politics of verticality, which he has written about in the context of the Israeli occupation of Gaza. For it is not technological
speed alone that assures control over the enemy, but also the ability to achieve higher
elevations in order to gain an observational advantage. The extraterrestrial satellite epitomizes the desire for dominance through verticality (DeNicola, 2006), but the hill, rooftop, and airplane are also technologies of verticality frequently deployed in practices of
state control.
Since the Second World War, US politicians, military leaders, and citizens have
claimed that their security is best protected through the techno-scientific mastery of the
skies, or of air space (DeNicola, 2006). Modern aerial strategy hinges on belief in a
cosmic view of air power in which aerial military technology can successfully identify,
unify and fix diverse populations on the ground (Kaplan, 2006). With modern fighter jets
and massive bomber planes, this cosmic view promises to offer security to nations
through the power of aerial mobility (Kaplan, 2006), in which state superiority is asserted
through technologies that enable state militaries to unleash upon enemies a barrage of
violence from the skies.
Since the attacks on 11 September 2001, Al Qaeda and other non-state violent networks have challenged the cosmic control premise of a clearly identifiable and geographically bounded enemy (Kaplan, 2006). A discourse of rival flexibility has emerged
whereby national security is threatened by decentralized, mobile, and unpredictable terrorist networks that camouflage their members by blending in within civilian, not military, environments (Kaplan, 2006). But military strategies and technologies are
themselves constantly changing in response to the tactics of enemy others. Drones are a
combination of the new and the old: a new aerial surveillance and killing system with
capabilities previously not offered by conventional air power, coupled with an older
cosmic view of air mastery through technological speed, verticality, and vision. Indeed,
contemporary discourses about UAVs often mention how drones can hover higher and
for longer periods of time than most surveillance planes can and are more mobile in their
transportation and operational capabilities. UAV systems are designed for greater operational flexibility than the bulky, albeit faster and more destructive, fighter jets and bombers that have been the cornerstones of modern aerial strategy. This functionality also
lends itself to international immigration control and border security, where, for instance,
South and Central American migrants attempt to traverse dangerous deserts while crossing militarized national borders patrolled by piloted and pilotless aircraft (Andreas,
2003). Therefore, the development and increasing obsession with drones in the service

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of national security can be seen as a strategic technological response to the decentralized

networks of non-state terrorism, and in the case of international immigration, the fluid
maneuverings of undocumented others.

Drones in the war on terror

The use of drones has increased steadily in recent years. Under the eight-year presidency
of George W. Bush, there were approximately 45 drone attacksor targeted killings
against suspected foreign combatants (CNN, 2010). Under the Obama administration,
targeted killings by drones increased significantly, especially in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. There were 51 UAV missile attacks in 2009 and 29 in the first four months of
2010 (CNN, 2010). A large portion of recent drone attacks have been covert CIA black
ops in Pakistan, which the US government initially denied but eventually admitted to
without disclosing many details. Accompanying this increase in drone violence is a controversial widening of acceptable targets for drone killing; originally the targets had to be
clearly identifiable and known terrorists, but this changed under Obama to include suspected terrorists whose actual identities are not necessarily known (Cloud, 2010). In the
words of CIA director Leon Panetta, drones are the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership (CNN, 2009).
Although the US government operates a variety of UAV models, the MQ-1 Predator
and the newer, more advanced MQ-9 Reaper drones are most frequently mobilized in
the war on terror and subsequently have brought the most public attention to UAVs. On
one hand, even though Predators often are armed with missiles, they have typically been
used as technologies of surveillance. They were the primary US drone operated in Iraq
and Afghanistan before the Reaper was developed in 2006. Reapers, on the other hand,
have been labeled the first hunter-killer UAVs that are designed to go after timesensitive targets with persistence and precision, and destroy or disable those targets
with 500-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles (US Air Force website, 2006). According
to General T. Michael Moseley of the US Air Force, Weve moved from using UAVs
primarily in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance roles before Operation Iraqi
Freedom, to a true hunter-killer role with the Reaper (US Air Force website, 2006). The
General observed that the name Reaper was suggested by members of the US Air Force
and that this name captures the lethal nature of this new weapon system (US Air Force
website, 2006).
Yet this remote-controlled violence against designated enemies of the US state
depends upon intensive aerial surveillance of bodies and movements on the ground
below. An unnamed, senior military official explained: Predators and other unmanned
aircraft have just revolutionized our ability to provide a constant stare against our enemy
(Barnes, 2009). As one drone operator stated, We spend 70 to 80 percent of our time
doing this, just scanning roads (Drew, 2009). During 2007 and 2008 in Iraq and
Afghanistan, Predator and Reaper drones flew 10,499 missions and fired missiles in 244
of those missions (Drew, 2009). In this same time frame, Predator and Reaper drones
were conducting 34 surveillance patrols each day in Iraq and Afghanistan which is
purportedly up from 12 [a day] in 2006 (Drew, 2009). These drone surveillance missions currently amass 16,000 hours of video each month and sometimes relay this intelligence footage to US soldiers on the ground (Drew, 2009).

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A new program dubbed the Gorgon Starenamed after the Greek mythological
figure whose gaze could turn victims into stonewill reportedly increase the single
video feed capable of being transmitted and recorded by standard drones to first 12 and
in due course to 65 video feeds (Barnes, 2009). A primary goal of drone surveillance is
to collect overhead imagery that might prove tactically useful for US commanders and
soldiers. As one journalist writes, By capturing images, the drones help soldiers determine how many houses there have power, for example, or where roads are, and other
quality of life data (Lubold, 2010). In the words of an anonymous intelligence officer:
For Afghanistan, for example, every day were analyzing imagery that includes the need
to distinguish between normal agriculture and poppy production, and in Iraq to distinguish between plastics production or concrete batching and homemade explosives production (Lubold, 2010).
The desire for omniscience through total vision is a common motif in theoretical treatments of surveillance (e.g. Foucault, 1977). It is also a product of an Enlightenment
rationality that aspires toward reason and progress through the cold, objective pursuit
of knowledge. As feminist science-studies scholars remind us, these longings for pure
knowledge, which seek to eviscerate bias and politics, are nonetheless marked forms of
knowledge that simply deny the values and prejudices inherent in their modes and
addresses of production (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1991; Monahan and Fisher, 2010).
These rationalities of so-called objective knowledge valorize the status quo while enforcing an exclusionary politics that denies or subjugates alternative ways of knowing. In the
case of drone surveillance in combat settings, the exclusionary politics of omniscient
vision not only harm ethnic and cultural others with great prejudice, but they also instigate an additional violence of radically homogenizing local difference, lumping together
innocent civilians with enemy combatants, women and children with wanted terrorist
leaders. From the sky, differences among people may be less detectable, orperhaps
more accuratelythe motivations to make such fine-grained distinctions may be attenuated in the drive to engage the enemy. When these mechanisms and logics of surveillance
are imported to non-combat settings, such as borderzones and civilian territories, they
may in turn further the violent dehumanization and non-differentiation of people while
expanding the scope of who could be included in the drones gaze. It is to these noncombat geographies and their populations that we next turn.

Policing migrants, drugs, and citizens

By meshing aerial reconnaissance with aerial bombardment, drones function primarily
as technologies of war. Yet UAVs are also being used as technologies of state surveillance and policing and are deployed in security-scapes other than military combat zones.
For instance, in the USA drones are increasingly being used to police foreign migrants in
relationship to its territorial borderzones, particularly by locating people who are attempting to enter the country illegally. In addition, as we will detail below, some police departments are now conceiving of drones as surveillance devices that might prove useful in
the routine policing and monitoring of domestic territories.
Soon after President Obama announced in May 2010 that 1200 National Guard soldiers (Werner and Billeaud, 2010) would be deployed to the already heavily militarized

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and surveilled USMexico border (Dunn, 1996; Pallitto and Heyman, 2008), conservative Arizona Governor Jan Brewer wrote a letter to Obama urging him to send also what
she referred to as aviation assets, specifically military UAVs and helicopters (Lach,
2010). Brewer asserted that drones have proven effective in US military campaigns overseas and that they would therefore assist in securing the US border:
I would also ask you, as overseas operations in Iraq and Afghanistan permit, to consider wider
deployment of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] along our nations southern border. I am
aware of how effective these assets have become in Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom,
and it seems UAVs operations would be ideal for border security and counter-drug missions.
(Quoted in Lach, 2010)

This appeal for drones at the border obscures the fact that UAVs have already been providing aerial surveillance over US border regions (Shachtman, 2005; Gilson, 2010).
Since 2006, the USA has spent approximately $100 million for UAVs on both the southern and northern US borders as part of its efforts to create a so-called virtual fence
(Canwest News Service, 2007). As of 2010 the US Customs and Border Protection
(CBP) was operating six unarmed Predator drones for overhead surveillance missions
along the USMexico border, five of which were based in Brewers state of Arizona
(Gilson, 2010). Since late 2007 or early 2008, the CBP has been testing drones in US/
Canada border regions (Canwest News Service, 2007). CBP officials credit their drones
with helping bust 15,000 lbs of pot and 4,000 illegal immigrants (Gilson, 2010). In the
words of a defense executive: It is quite easy to envision a future in which (UAVs), unaffected by pilot fatigue, provide 247 border and port surveillance to protect against terrorist intrusion Other examples [of possible uses] are limited only by our imagination
(McCullagh, 2006).
Clearly, drones have been enlisted in efforts to restrict illegal immigration and combat
the war on drugs. The notion of drug drones has become fashionable in international
drug enforcement, especially for use in maritime operations (Padgett, 2009). For instance,
under the name Monitoreo, which is Spanish for monitoring, the US Southern Command
recently conducted a drone testing project that mobilized an Israeli-made $6.5 million
Heron drone from El Salvadors Comalapa Air Base to track down suspected drug cartel
members who were allegedly using the open waters to smuggle drugs into the USA
(Padgett, 2009; see also Shachtman, 2009). By remaining thousands of feet in the air for
up to 20-hours while being equipped with a set of sensors better suited for spotting the
subs [mini-submarines] that have become so popular among narco-cartels (Shachtman,
2009), this particular Heron drone promises to be a longer endurance technology than
conventional planes commonly used in drug surveillance. As Time magazine journalist
Tim Padgett (2009) writes,
If battlefield drones like the Predator can scan and bomb Taliban targets in the mountains of
Afghanistan, the logic goes, a similar drone like the Heron should be able to find the go fast
boats and submarines used by drug cartels in the waters of this hemisphere.

UAVs are also currently flying in the skies over some cities in both the USA and
United Kingdom. As reported in 2006,

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one North Carolina county is using a UAV equipped with low-light and infrared cameras to
keep watch on its citizens. The aircraft has been dispatched to monitor gatherings of motorcycle
riders at the Gaston County fairgrounds from just a few hundred feet in the airclose enough
to identify facesand many more uses, such as the aerial detection of marijuana fields, are
planned.
(McCullagh, 2006)

In 2007, the Houston Police Department in Texas controversially tested the use of
unarmed surveillance drones, with the eventual objective of monitoring traffic, aiding
evacuations during natural disasters, helping with search and rescue operations, and
assisting with other tactical police incidents (Dean, 2007). The Executive Assistant
Police Chief admitted that UAVs over the skies of Houston could include covert police
actions and that the police force was not ruling out someday using the drones for writing traffic tickets (Dean, 2007). In another example, a confidential document revealed
that the Las Vegas Police Department may have been using UAVs above the city of Las
Vegas as early as 2007 (Public Intelligence, 2010). The document further outlines a plan
for UAVs to help monitor special events and discusses ways in which the Las Vegas
UAVs are integrated into Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fusion centers to
assist with the investigation of suspicious activity reports (Public Intelligence, 2010). As
noted in other work on the militarization of cities, the application of drone technologies
to urban areas promises to extend the surveillance networks within which people are
caught (Murakami Wood, 2007) and intensify the policing of cultural difference and
political dissent that have historically marked cities as vibrant, democratic spaces
(Graham, 2010).
Within the current political and cultural milieu, this particular movement of military technology to civilian spheres reveals a symbiotic relationship between the war
on crime and war on terror. Jonathan Simon (2007: 11) persuasively argues that in
some respects the war on terror is an unacknowledged continuation of the war on
crime, sharing with it similar discourses and institutional arrangements. When the
rationalities and technologies of the war on terror are applied to other domains and
other perceived threats, there is a heightened danger that existing legal protections and
rights will be vitiated in the process, thereby ratcheting up cultures of control
that already disproportionately harm marginalized populations (Wacquant, 2009). For
instance, DHS fusion centers may have originated as organizations to share data
on terrorist threats, but they have since been linked to spying on non-violent antiwar protesters, environmentalists, students at historically black colleges, and others
(Monahan, 2011).
In contemporary cultures of control, all populations may be called uponor be
responsibilizedto manage risk in highly individualized ways and through increasingly
privatized means (Rose, 1999), but this in no way indicates a diminished role for the
state, or state-corporate apparatuses, in extending discipline and control into domestic
territories (Garland, 2001; Monahan, 2010). The use of drones in non-combat settings
may symbolically transform those sites to arenas of agonistic engagement and further
militarize domestic police departments and government agencies to the detriment of
individual liberties and the public good.

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The drone stare and its limits

Drone systems necessarily objectify, and most likely dehumanize, people targeted by
them. The ongoing informatization of warfare leads to increased mediation of combat
experiences (Robins and Levidow, 1995; Haggerty, 2006; Monahan and Wall, 2007) and
this is definitely the case for many UAV pilots who sit at 1990s-style computer banks
filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers (Drew, 2009) and kill enemy fighters with a
few computer keystrokes. Then, after their shifts are over, they get to drive home and
sleep in their own beds (Lindlaw, 2008). Taken together, the techno-scientific mediation
of modern-day weapons systems and the symbolic mediation of television and computer
screens allow drone pilots and the general public to view war from a distance while
making way for organized state violence to be seen as virtuous (Der Derian, 2001)that
is, clean, precise, and noble. In this context of computerized postmodern warfare (Gray,
1997), it seems reasonable to assert, as Kevin Robins and Les Levidow (1995: 120) did
in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991:
Killing is done at a distance, through technological mediation, without the shock of direct
confrontation. The victims become psychologically invisible. The soldier appears to achieve a
moral dissociation; the targeted things on the screen do not seem to implicate him in a moral
relationship.

The technological mediation vital to what we call the drone stare is most often framed
by advocates of UAV systems as an unproblematic ability to see the truth of a particular
situation (see Rattansi, 2010) or to achieve a totalizing view of the object under cosmic
control. In the words of Robins and Levidow (1995: 121): Enemy threatsreal or imaginary, human or machinebecame precise grid locations, abstracted from their human
context. To the extent that this description is accurate, it would appear to hold true for
the use of drones in combat as well as non-combat settings.
Journalist Noah Shachtman (2005), who observed drone operators monitoring the
USMexico border, betrays through his description the dehumanizing tendency of dronemediated perceptions: Everyone looks like germs, like ants, from the Hunters 15,000foot point of view. Especially when the ant hill breaks apart, and everybody scatters in a
dozen different directions. But this particular articulation makes no distinction between
illegal immigrants, political refugees, or Mexican-American citizens. In this sense, the
drone system radically homogenizes these identities into a single cluster of racialized
information that is used for remote-controlled processes of control and harm. Bodies
below become things to track, monitor, apprehend, and kill, while the pilot and other
allies on the network remain differentiated and proximate, at least culturally if not
physically.
In the case of the use of military drones for precision killing, the practical action of
firing a Hellfire missile is translated and transformed by the informational system into a
computerized checklist of things to do. As one journalist writes concerning US Air
Force drones, Now, pilots say, it takes up to 17 stepsincluding entering data into a
pull-down windowto fire a missile (Drew, 2009). In this respect, as Kevin Haggerty
(2006) has pointed out, the speed and mobility of informatized warfare is perforce slowed
by attendant complex systems of control, which is a generalizable finding that presents

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an important caution against overdetermined conclusions about inevitable increases in

the velocity of war technologies. But this step-by-step process of entering data into a
computer system nonetheless propagates a dehumanizing abstraction when living human
beings are rendered into mere spatial or tactical coordinates. As Avital Ronell (1992: 75)
puts it: the cyborg soldier, located in command and control systems, exercises on the
fields of denial. Killing transpires not only at a distance but through the routine, banal
computerized procedure of typing and clicking. UAV systems, according to one military
drone operator, are pretty simple to operate but,
the challenge is taking all the information available and fusing it into something thats usable
and then practicing and exercising the constraint or the lethal power to either preserve life or to
prosecute an attack. And that is where the challenge really is, honing that warrior spirit
knowing when to say when.
(Rattansi, 2010)

But as we have discussed, this knowing when to say when is not a decision that is
made in a vacuum but is rather a sovereign act shaped by social and political norms,
which are encoded in both the institutional practices and technological systems of drone
warfare.
The state killing enacted by UAV systems exists in a discursive and symbolic context
where a steadfast belief in precision technology helps justify the techno-scientific violence of the West (Shaw, 2005). Central to common representations of virtuous warfare,
and especially aerial warfare, is the idea that the USA is technologically superior to other
countries in its war capabilities, particularly because of its reliance on smart bombs and
precision-guided missiles that distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate targets
(Der Derian, 2001). This, in turn, brings about an expectation that militaries should go to
great lengths to use their violence in discriminatory ways that target combatants while
avoiding civilians (Beier, 2003). Militaries in technologically advanced countries such as
the US embrace this rhetoric to assert that they have the capacity to conduct war in more
legal and moral ways than less technologically advanced countries (Beier, 2003).
Of course, claims to technological sophistication are always relative ones that can
invite hubris on the part of those parties presuming superiority. This was revealed when
it was discovered in 2009 that Iraqi insurgents had accessed unencrypted video footage
from US Predator drones (Gorman et al., 2009). This example, while embarrassing for
US military officials, illustrates a paradox in the construction of the enemy other.
Insurgents were apparently presumed too backward and unsophisticated to tap unencrypted signals broadcasted by the USA. By intercepting these signals with apparent ease
using $26 off-the-shelf software (Gorman et al., 2009) and storing the feeds on laptop
computers, the enemy effectively elevated its own symbolic legitimacy as civilized peoples, in large part because in the West technological achievement and ability are often
equated with civilization (Adas, 1989). The enemy moreover demonstrated its agency
and its refusal to become a legible and docile object for western control.
People who are aware of adversarial monitoring from the skies also engage in tactics
to evade the drone stare. Specifically, subjects of drone surveillance have tried to be
stealthier and camouflage themselves better than they have in the past. In the North

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Waziristan region of Pakistan where drone surveillance and violence has been heavily
concentrated, the standard ways in which militants have traditionally traveled, slept, and
communicated has been significantly altered by the aerial gaze of UAVs, according to
some local sources (Perlez and Shah, 2010). Combatants have allegedly abandoned satellite phones and large gatherings in favor of communicating by courier and moving
stealthily in small groups while also establishing hide-outs in mountainside tunnels and
relying more on civilian-looking transportation as opposed to all-terrain vehicles
(Perlez and Shah, 2010). In addition, if past ruses of camouflage and spatial deception
employed by undocumented immigrants along US border regions are good indicators,
undocumented migrants seeking entrance to the USA will find new ways of subverting
and disappearing from the gaze of UAVs (Corchado, 2003).
Still, discourses of technological accuracy and hegemonic control persist. According
to one drone operator:
unlike all the other weapons systems out there, I can control collateral damage to a much
greater degree in this and I can minimize it and negate it because if I see a high-value
individualone of those jackpot guysthat I want to prosecute an attack on Im not limited by
gas. Im not limited by the physiological constraints of the air crew. Ill swap another air crew
out. Ill bring another plane out and have them run in there and I will stay with that individual
until the time is right by my making.
(Rattansi, 2010)

But the discourse of discriminatory precision bombing is primarily a fantasy because

civilians are still the most common victims of aerial warfare (Tanaka and Young, 2009).
In addition, accuracy is a social construction, even in the context of advanced missile
delivery systems (MacKenzie, 1993). Although the extent to which US drone missile
attacks have killed foreign civilians is highly contested, it is widely recognized that
Hellfire missiles have killed people who were not legitimate targets (Bergen and
Tiedemann, 2010). Official Pakistani sources claim that approximately 700 civilians
were killed in 2009 alone, and in a study of US drone attacks in Pakistan from 2004 to
early 2010, the New America Foundation found that around 32 percent of drone-induced
deaths during this time were civilians (Bergen and Tiedemann, 2010).
Clearly, the privilege of having a cosmic view distances drone operators from retaliatory violence. With the drone pilot potentially thousands of miles away, drones actualize
a risk-transfer war (Shaw, 2005), wherein the goal is to reduce or eliminate the deaths
of our own while still producing significant casualties for the enemy. In this sense,
drone operators engage in a semi-voyeuristic manipulation or destruction of distant
others:
Digital footage from the robot planes is now routinely sent everywhere the militarys network
extends, which means soldiers far removed from the front lines finally get to see a little action
in real time. Its like a video game, says one analyst who served at U.S. Central Command
headquarters in Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar. It can get a little bloodthirsty. But its fucking
cool.
(Shachtman, 2005)

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But some military drone operators, who have also flown combat missions in manned
aircraft such as F-16 fighter jets, say that the technological mediation of UAV systems
is more visceral and phenomenologically complex than a video game experience, in
large part because of the advanced camera systems of the drones. With UAVs, one particular pilot claimed to feel:
more connected with the ground fight than I ever did when I was flying over the top at 20,000
feet, the reason being that I am much [more] involved in coordination and contact with those
ground forces that are taking fire than I ever was in a F-16 it comes together to create a much
more tangible, much more real event then [sic] I experienced when I was dropping bombs
from F-16s.
(Rattansi, 2010)

Similarly, another former F-16 pilot comments that when flying an F-16, you come in at
500600 miles per hour, drop a 500-pound bomb and then fly away, you dont see what
happens, but when remotely piloting Predator drones you watch it all the way to impact,
and I mean its very vivid, its right there and personal. So it does stay in peoples minds
for a long time (Lindlaw, 2008). Yet another drone pilot said, When youre on the radio
with a guy on the ground, and he is out of breath and you can hear the weapons fire in the
background, you are every bit as engaged as if you were actually there (Drew, 2009).
Although we should be skeptical of this claim of realistic experiences created
through interactions with drone systems, there have been some reports that drone operators have expressed emotional and psychological difficulties due to this mediated intimacy and physical distanciation. As one drone pilot explains, It is quite different, going
from potentially shooting a missile, then going to your kids soccer game (Lindlaw,
2008). Even after the missiles have been fired and flesh ripped apart, the drone stare is
often ordered to linger in the air to record and observe the destruction produced by the
UAV system. As another drone operator states:
You do stick around and see the aftermath of what you did, and that does personalize the fight
You have a pretty good optical picture of the individuals on the ground. The images can be
pretty graphic, pretty vivid, and those are the things we try to offset [through psychiatric
treatment and psychological and spiritual counseling].
(Lindlaw, 2008)

Previous analyses of the psychological effects of killing suggest that killing is easier
to do from a distance and becomes progressively more difficult the closer one is to ones
victim (Grossman, 2009). In the case of UAVs, however, the pilots may be on the other
side of the globe yet nonetheless feel proximate to those with whom they engage. This
may create the possibility for a re-personalization of distant, technologically mediated
attacks, wherein pilots register some experiences of trauma and responsibility. This phenomenon could vitiate some of the dehumanizing tendencies of remote warfare or, at the
very least, render the experiences visceral for those viewing the monitors, whether they
are pilots or the public.
The technological politics of drone systems hinge upon the productive capabilities of
these devices, which extend beyond their use for missile strikes. By means of the drone

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assemblage of aircraft, cameras, missiles, communication technology, and distant pilots,

people down below, whether migrants, insurgents, or citizens, are abstracted from their
local social, political, and geographical contexts. The targets of drone surveillance are
thereby translated into objectified representations of risk and value, but, as Jacques
Derrida (1981) would remind us, there is always a remainder that exceeds neat binary
equations of semiotic meaning. The remainders here include forms of collateral damage,
whether innocent people wrongfully targeted or inadvertently killed, or civil liberties and
human rights sidelined or oppressed through the ongoing militarization of borders and
domestic spaces. Other remainders are psychological effects experienced by drone pilots;
by allies, neutral parties, supposed enemies on the ground; and by distant witnesses to
drone warfare, which may include anyone in the world with access to the relevant media
streams. Finally, there is the important and nagging remainder of the agency of the Other,
who refuses to be petrified and immobilized by the drone stare, who exploits the technological hubris and vulnerabilities of the West, and who devises new tactics of camouflage
and mobility to evade the reach of surveillance and violence from above.

Conclusions
As surveillance and military devices, drones offer a prism for theorizing the technological politics of warfare and governance. This prism reveals some violent articulations of
US imperialism and nationalism, the translation of bodies into targets for remote monitoring and destruction, and the insidious application of militarized systems and rationalities to domestic territories and populations. In this article, we analyzed the deployment
of drones primarily within two different liminal security-scapes: warzones in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Pakistan and borderzones and urban areas in the USA. While we readily
acknowledge profound variation and diversity both within and across these securityscapes, extant resonances and dissonances, especially with the use of drones, reveal
broader patterns in forms of state operations. Notably, the drone stare depends upon processes that seek to insulate pilots and allies from direct harm while subjecting targets to
precision scrutiny and/or attack. The drone stare further abstracts targets from political,
cultural, and geographical contexts, thereby reducing variation, difference, and noise that
may impede action or introduce moral ambiguity. In combination, these processes further normalize the ongoing subjugation of those marked as Other, those targeted for
discriminatory observation and attack, those without comparable resources to contest the
harmful categories within which they are placed.
Whether the forms of drone surveillance and violence operate in discursive, representational, and/or physical registers, they are always articulations of identity and
scripted assertions of value that are far from objective or benign. UAVs may reside
within a paradigm of cosmic control that seeks strategic advantage through systems of
verticality, but rather than mirror reality below in some positivistic way, the drone
assemblage executes socio-technical codes that objectify others while blurring all identities within the apparatus. Some of these blurred identities include insurgent and civilian, criminal and undocumented migrant, remotely located pilot and front-line soldier.
Not only does the use of military drones destabilize identities and their representations
in both combat and borderzones, but conceptual categories as well are subjected to

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homogenization of radical difference as borders are refashioned as combat zones and

combat zones are construed as ontological borders between us and them, or civilization and barbarism.
UAV surveillance practices furthermore reveal a primary, unstable fault line with surveillance in risk societies: exact identification and targeted control of individuals is subordinated to imperatives of preemptive risk management of populations and groups.
Individualizing and differentiating surveillance is still highly valued, of course; it just
gives way toor is subsumed bypractical needs and expediencies which may appear
to be rational and technocratic but are nonetheless infused with prejudicial understandings and evaluations of subjects. Thus, actuarial forms of surveillance seek precision
within certain homogenizing parameters. In the case of UAVs, this arrangement may
increase instances of state crimes such as the direct or indirect killing of innocents, which
can occur through drone missile attacks or through the further militarization of dangerous borderzones. Broadly speaking, perhaps the ultimate objective of informational surveillance in and by institutions is to supplant the group with the individual as the primary
unit of analysisor, beyond that, to perceive individuals as comprised of groups (of
preferences, risks, probabilities) and act on whichever attributes are deemed meaningful
for particular functions or goals. Still, it would be a mistake to think that more finegrained detail and differentiation would move surveillance systems closer to truthful
representations of people. As long as a risk-management paradigm prevails, prejudicial
social sortingor mortality triage, as the case may bewill continue, as will unjustifiable interventions based on profiles and probabilities.
Acknowledgement
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No.
SES 0853749.

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Tyler Wall is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Eastern Kentucky University.
Torin Monahan is Associate Professor of Human &Organizational Development and Associate
Professorof Medicine at VanderbiltUniversity.